How to celebrate a birthday at the cemetery:
Step 1: Dress in warm clothes, boots, gloves, etc.
Step 2: Make sure to pack a snow shovel
Step 3: Grab all the decorations and trudge through mud, ice, and water puddles
to reach the snow drift that your daughters headstone is buried in somewhere!
Step 4: Do math as you line up the telephone pole and the tree at an
intersecting point so you know approximately where the headstone is at.
Step 5: Start digging and digging and digging
Step 6: Keep digging and digging and digging
Step 7: Get frustrated and wonder if all the gravestones just disappeared
during the snowstorm??? Wonder if she was already resurrected and there is no
grave anymore!!!
Step 8: Finally find the headstone!!! Dig all around the headstone and a place
for you to kneel in the snow to decorate.
Step 9: Have the cold wind whip up and blow stuff around to make it even more
difficult and to make it even more freezing!
Step 10: Finish decorating and take pictures.
Step 11: Stand over the grave wishing she was not out in this awful cold and
snow and that you could have her come home with you to celebrate a real
birthday with presents and cake and ice cream.
Step 12: Kiss your hand and place that kiss on her headstone and wish her a
happy birthday while tears stream down your face.
Step 13: Trudge back over the snowdrift, ice, mud, and water puddles back to
the car. Sit in the car with heater running while you look at pictures and
stare out at the grave you just decorated wishing with all your heart that
things could be different.
Yep just another birthday celebration at the cemetery--not fun! I am grateful
that it wasn't a snow blizzard and the sun was shining even though it wasn't
warm, that some of the deeper snow had melted and that we did find her
headstone under all that snow so I could decorate it. In the 13 years I've
decorated her headstone for her birthday, this is the worst experience we've
had so far. I'm grateful that for most of the other years it has been nice dry
weather and that I have never had to dig for her headstone like we did today!
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